Dear Michelle,
I might have found something important, a hidden Italian contribution (in the 1940s, when so many Europeans had to escape to NY) to the birth, growth and emergence of a liberal culture, that is now fully deploying, for the first time ever, in your beloved husband as a President; that we feel as Our President in Italy as well, as everywhere in this cosmopolitan world (and this is another first time in History, I must say). I am about to post this idea, and this is an excerpt from the English Abstract of my post. It will appear on all 3 my blogs which are named below, with my signature. When my hypothesis will be a bit more robust, I might send an op-ed to the NYT on the subject, eventually.

ENGLISH ABSTRACT
the Secret Magister of the Novecento
the hidden roots in Lucania (Italy) of Obama’s way of thinking

NICOLA “NICK” CHIAROMONTE (1903 – 1972). Born in Rapolla, Lucania, Italia. He died in Rome.
A unique figure of a coherent, self made and – hiddenly, behind the scenes – highly influential anti-totalitarian intellectual, with many curiosities in philosophy, a pioneering critique of Historicism and a great passion for theatre (where he believed Brecht was by far overvalued).
A pioneer of lib-socialism (although he early split in 1935, in Paris from the Rosselli brothers GL, Justice and Liberty group, for not paying lipservice to Italian nationalism and Risorgimento), in the company of Arendt, Camus, Orwell and Weil. He fought in Spain with André Malraux’s aviation team: a real legend.
When in New York (Summer 1941-47), he played a widely recognised Magister role in the liberal, anti-stalinist intelligentsia of the Partisan Review and Macdonald’s Politics, although he had to fight hard against a well alive marxism, yet. He was the best friend of Mary McCarthy (…).

A Maestro of the Novecento, he found his own Maestri in Andrea Caffi, Gaetano Salvemini and someone younger than him: Simone Weil. While he despised Gramsci as a cattivo maestro of generations.
We argue here that the hybridation of seminal European and American New Lefts, that happened in New York under his Invisible Direction in the 1940s, was a decisive, necessary and irreversible step toward the (path dependent) emergence of contemporary Liberalism in the East Coast, that has now expressed its most mature figure in President Obama.
The man with the energy and innovation, as not only to stop the Reagan-Clinton decadence, but to establish a Liberal cultural and political “hegemony” (NOT in the awful, collectivist and retro Gramsci sense!), without antecedents in US history. It is impossible to understand where all this comes from, unless you dig deep, and also in the legacy of a man who literally came from the Nothing: il “cafone lucano”. Point is: of the two Nothings (Emanuele Severino), he was just coming from the Future (on a Time Machine). Thanks, Nick!
It is time to make Justice triumph. Time is ripe for the world, from Mumbai to LA to know whom we have also to reward for the ongoing change.

The truth about such a despised and forgotten man, whose imagination, fed by Simone’s fertile one, created an Impossible Thought Experiment – a libertarian socialism freed by Marxism – that we can now translate into a Real Experiment.

I follow every day the political battle in the US, and I am deeply engaged in doing the same in Italy. We can’t believe yet all this is true, and all our destinies changed 180° in less than one year!
Thank you from the deep of my heart.
enzo fabio

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